Working women in the struggle for socialism and the struggle against religion

Among the most important tasks that the Bolsheviks set themselves upon coming to power was to emancipate Soviet citizens from religion. Along with equality and the literacy campaign that was intimately connected with it, antireligious propaganda was a key component of the cultural front during the 1920s and 1930s. One of the examples of such propaganda is this antireligious and pro – feminist poster from 1931 that says: “Working women in the struggle for socialism and the struggle against religion. Religion is an instrument of enslavement of a working woman”.

The Bolsheviks wanted to recreate society completely, creating an ideal religion free world where all people were equal. This notion of equality included women, who up until this point, were limited to domestic work. According James von Geldern’s The New Women article, this made the Soviet Union “the most progressive nation in the world on issues of gender”, because now women were expected to be a part of the workforce outside of their homes. Their roles within the family also changed with new Soviet policies. Bolsheviks thought that women should gain independence from the traditional roles they had played in the past. The state required women as workers and thus enabled them access to education, a career, and legal guarantees of equality. In fact, women were encouraged to complete their studies and professional training, and to become scientists, doctors, construction workers, engineers, journalists, or architects just like in the poster.

According James von Geldern’s The New Women article, in 1917 a legislature was created to try to weaken marriage and the family to create a unified society focused on the country and not the family. The ability to perform marriages was taken away from the church and was given solely to the state. With this set of laws also came the right for women in a married couple “to divorce their husbands without obtaining his or any other permission” (Gelbern). And because of these significant legislative victories in the first years of the revolution and women’s march against tsarist authorities that lead to the collapse of the old regime, the centrality of women and their agendas to the socialist state was symbolized by a new official holiday, International Women’s Day. On March 8th, this holiday became a political celebration to symbolize the fight of women (Gelbern).

Karl Marx’s and Frederick Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848 states that there should be free education for all children in public schools because “it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie” (Marx Engels). And this ideology of everyone having access to education is shown by having Lenin’s and Marx’s teachings in the top left corner of the poster. This shows how even though everyone had access to education, the education system was controlled by the state and was entirely religious free. In the bottom left and right corners the working women’s glowing future is portrayed as a wedge splitting the darkness of religious ignorance (bottom left) and the brutality of an alcoholic husband and staggering chores of a traditional home life (bottom right). These two images show how the communists were anti-religious and against alcohol, because they wanted everyone to be healthy so they can work in the factories. This poster as a whole portrays the inequality within the family structure, conflict in how the family works, and how education, religion, and politics play into the role of the ideal woman in the perfect socialist world.

But unfortunately, this ideal woman did not turn out exactly as planned under Stalin’s regime. According Lewis Siegelbaum’s Abolition of Legal Abortion, instead of creating gender neutrality, women were not treated equally under the new laws. The attempts to create a new womanhood did change the way women were expected to behave, but they did not necessarily become the equal of their male counterparts. Also, not all of the changes that the Bolsheviks wanted took place. The Bolshevik idea of the “new family” did not take effect during Stalin’s time. According to Siegelbaum, “Soviet women would carry the double burden of holding a job in the wage-labor force and working in the home raising children (Siegelbaum). This means that women were not freed from their roles as domestic leaders, but in fact they now were forced to play a larger role at both work and at home because most of the domestic work instead of being divided amongst the family was piled onto the female in the family. Even though men and women had equal rights men still viewed housework and domestic chores as women’s work. This put a great amount of stress onto the females of the household trying to balance work and chores at home. All of this led to a new type of womanhood, which was not necessarily what the Bolsheviks had wanted, but nonetheless was a major change for Soviet women.